Think you know Sidney Nolan? This exhibition asks you to look again

For Sometimes I Miss the Applause, a work commissioned by the Heide Museum in 2022, Cross performed a rehearsal, of sorts, of a key solo from The Rite of Spring, wearing an adidas tracksuit, a Nolan mask and a brown paper bag that echoed Kelly’s helmet.

Cross hangs his own work alongside Nolan’s in Two Heads, an “impossible collaboration” across time and cultures which aims to question the collaboration between Nolan and Helpmann.

“These two expat Australian dudes who had this idealised dream of what Australia is or could be. But it was a very narrow perspective. That’s what’s pushing my thinking in this weird collaborative show that makes no sense. What kind of fool of a painter, today, me, would put their own paintings up against Nolan’s canonical paintings?”

“Er, that does seem brave,” I suggest.

“It’s stupid is what it is. There’s no way my paintings stand up and that’s the joke, nor could the collaboration in The Display stand up. None of it can. It always has to fail. We always have to renew, culturally, forever. I don’t know if that’s going to land. But that’s the goal.”

Over the two years Nolan worked on the Kelly series at the Reeds’ kitchen table at Heide, the artist filled the bushranger’s turbulent world with elements from his own surroundings – the homestead’s floral wallpaper, its floor pattern, a crocheted rug. As his relationship with the Reeds soured, then fractured for good, the paintings also became his “farewell to Melbourne”.

In a contemporary link to the city, the Kelly series is hung in Nolan: Origins with a soundtrack by Melbourne singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett, whose sparse electric guitar lends the 27 paintings, already cinematic in theirscope, a touch of the Hollywood western.

In 1947, Nolan left Victoria, travelled through Queensland, married John Reed’s sister Cynthia and relocated to Sydney. By 1953, the year Nolan: Origins ends, he had begun to gain international attention and moved to the UK.

By then he had ceased being the maverick abstractionist who once used boot polish as a medium and painted the walls for his first solo exhibition bright pink. He was now being referred to as Australia’s national painter. In 1981, he was knighted. He died in 1992.

In time, his paintings of Ned Kelly became entwined, not only with his own messy personal life, but with Australia’s own identity and complicated sense of self. Artist Shaun Gladwell, whose black-leather-clad motorcyclist in Approach to Mundi Mundi (2007) fuses Mad Max with strange Sid, once observed that in Nolan’s Ned Kelly (1946), the viewer sees through the bushranger’s helmet, inviting us all to “inhabit this empty armour and ask ourselves: do we have it within us to be so wild, so passionate, so revolutionary?”

Nolan: Origins is at the Art Gallery of NSW until February 7, 2027. Two Heads is at the Canberra Museum and Gallery until June 27, 2027.

John Saxby is a writer, photographer and former editor of Spectrum, who has worked as an editor at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Art Gallery of NSW.